All that we see or seem, 

Is but a dream within a dream.

 --Edgar Allan Poe, 1827 

 
The cat died in his arms, having convulsed once.  He petted it gently, feeling its heartbeat fade.  Hearing the rasping gasp some called a death rattle as it convulsed again, but weakly this time.  More weakly than just before, this the last strength its life had left to give it.

Fighting to the end.

The man, an old man, was not ashamed to cry.  He and the tom cat, still young, but cancerous -- that's what the X-ray at the vet's had shown -- shot with cortisone in the vain hope that it might shrink the tumor -- had been more than just friends.  They had been companions, almost as if married, the one's pursuits complementing the other's:  the cat's with his mouse-catching, the old man's gardening that sometimes brought vegetables to the table.  The long evenings sitting, the man watching TV, the cat purring in his lap.

It had been Sunday, and Monday the man dug a grave in his garden.  He was retired from work, so he was able to take the whole morning, scooping it out at the base of a fruit tree, making it deep and long.  Making the sides straight.  "Fisher," he said -- he had named the cat Fisher, telling his few friends it was because cats caught fish, or, if they didn't, at least they ate them.  "Fisher," he said, as he lifted the cat to carry it outside once he had finished, "it's been a good time for us.  Not as long, certainly, as I would have liked -- as it should have been -- but a good time, still."

He laid the cat in the hole, petting it one more time, gazing into its now-glazed eyes, then, trowel by trowelful covered it over with good, rich garden earth, tamping the grave's top into a low mound.  He said a short prayer, even though he knew that prayers didn't matter -- not any more.  After all, animals didn't go to heaven or hell like preachers said people do.

Nevertheless, he had named the cat Fisher because, one evening, looking in Fisher's eyes, he had had the sudden notion the cat was looking back into his own soul.

#

That evening he cried again.  He ate his dinner, remembering first to put Fisher's bowl away, washed and dried, into the dish cupboard, then watched TV, feeling the loneliness.  And that night, mice came.

He saw them in his dreams, not overtly, but gnawing their inroads into his dreams' corners.  Shadowy, black and gray, never quite seen, but their presence known anyway.

Daytimes he heard noises, faint, muffled scamperings, as if within his house's walls, once again never sure.  Never quite seeing them, even their rustlings fading to silence the instant he rose from the chair he was sitting in, thinking he might walk to where he had heard them.  Thinking he might kneel and press his ear to the wall, down by the baseboard, to know for sure if he _had_ heard movements.

He knew there were mice now, even if still unseen -- from signs they left that had never been there when Fisher was still alive.

And so, perhaps as a kind of totem -- a kind of Vodoun respecting of the dead -- he took to putting Fisher's bowls out again, the food and water bowls.  Empty, of course, so containing no more than phantom nourishment, but, still, a sort of shrine.  Similarly, he found and put out Fisher's cat toys, the hard rubber ball, the catnip-filled mouse, in, as closely as he could remember, the exact spots on the living room rug where Fisher had left them.  When last the cat had strength enough left to play with them.

Yet, still, the dreams came, not of Fisher, but phantom mice gnawing away at his mind's edges.  And real mice too -- he found a trail of droppings one morning defiling the water bowl.  

Not just phantom noises.

And, more and more now at night, shadowy mouse-forms invaded his dreams until at last, one night, from sheer weight of numbers they covered them over.

#

He woke in an alley, stretching his furred body, not the sleek form of a pampered, neutered pet, but a raging tom, growling a warning at another cat that had come too near.  One eye with a permanent squint from some fight, perhaps years in the past.

Old, as the man had been, but wise and still strong.  Sniffing the morning air.

He smelled the mouse-scent.

Fur on end, he stalked the shadows the small came from -- possibly no mouse, this spoor, but that of a rat.

Ears flattened.  Growling.

He saw, in black and white, as if an old movie, motion between two cans.  Clattering, they fell as he dodged behind them, dislodging the creatures that skulked in their shade, sharp claws raking their gray flesh.  Killing one, eating it -- no player with his food was _this_ alley tom.  Slashing again with his claws at the other rat as, getting past by less than inches, it managed its own escape.

He washed the blood down, drinking from an alley puddle, one that was still fairly clean -- cats have weak memories, but, somehow, he knew it had rained the past night.  And that, somehow, there was a place he needed to go to.

No fisher of fish, this cat.

Rather, the tom stalked over cracked sidewalks, spending the better part of half a day, until it arrived in a more well kept part of town.  This a district of houses with their own yards.

And there was one house that seemed to stand out for him, one with a bedroom window enough open that he could squeeze through, seeing the man, dead, on the bed by the wall.  It knew of dead men.

Sometimes, in alleys, men died of knife wounds.

But then it hid, hearing sounds.  Frantic knockings.  Later a splintering -- a front door forced open.  A sound of men, of police and technicians and paramedics as the afternoon sun descended, ending with a covered stretcher being carried out.

And, when once again the house was silent, the tom eased its way out the way it had come in.  He crept to the back yard, the moon just rising now, sniffing and finding and sniffing again at a small patch of earth at the base of a tree, not having even the barest idea what attracted him to it.  

------

James Dorr's current collections, DARKER LOVES: TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET and STRANGE MISTRESSES: TALES OF WONDER AND ROMANCE, are available from Dark Regions Press, while other work has appeared in ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, NEW MYSTERY, ABORIGINAL SF, FANTASTIC STORIES, DARK WISDOM, GOTHIC.NET, CHI-ZINE, ENIGMATIC TALES (UK), FAERIES (France), and numerous anthologies. Dorr is an active member of SFWA and HWA, an Anthony (mystery) and Darrell (fiction set in the US Mid-South) finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a multi-time listee in THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR eleven of the past seventeen years. 

Also just out from Dorr are a novella, THE GARDEN, from Damnation Books and short stories “River Red” in the anthology ESCAPE CLAUSE (Ink Oink Art Inc. Publishing) and “The Dripping Nose that Wouldn’t Wipe” in TOOTH DECAY (Sonar4 Publications).